Imagine the early days of the internet back when there was dialup. If you got an outrageously huge bill, would you pay it or fight it?

In this story, one guy is in this situation, and he tries to fight the bill. When he loses, he switches gears and insists on paying the bill no matter what even when the service provider wants him to stop paying.

Keep reading for all the details.

You sure you want your money? Fine you’re gonna get every penny.

This guy, we’ll call him G, was pretty wealthy. Dude had a nepo job where he “worked” in a factory fixing the machinery which almost literally never broke.

Someone always had to be on duty to be ready for repairs, so he got all kinds of overtime and was being paid almost $75/hr in the early 00’s. To give you an idea of the kind of money he was making and how he didn’t care.

He spent most whole days sitting around watching movies on a personal laptop that he had spent over $2000 on and just left it at his desk.

If he had a call to the floor it would take him no more than an hour and that would happen maybe three times in a week. Holidays where 2.5x pay and he worked every one of them.

He was a techy and pretty advanced for the time.

This guy was a bit of a tech nerd and he got an ISDN account as soon as it came out.

For you youngins or folks who weren’t savvy at the time, ISDN was basically two 56.6kbps modems smooshed together. This was back when 56.6k was as good as it got for residential and you could still pay for slower. So, fast (for it’s day).

Back in the days of dial-up, the dark ages, some services would be paid by the minute of usage in addition to your monthly bill and that’s how this worked. Also, because “dial-up” was literal and used existing infrastructure, you could take your modem with you and use it somewhere else by logging into your account from a new location and dialing the closest number to you.

This was also back in the day of long distance charges.

His brother messed up.

Now for the actual story.

G just got his ISDN modem and after a day or so took it to his brother’s house one town over to show him how fast it was and after they played around on the internet for a bit, G had to go to work and he would be doing some long shifts for the next couple of days, so his brother asked to borrow his modem, which G said was fine.

I don’t understand exactly how it happened but his brother had signed into a long distance number and then forget to shut the connection down.

And then G got his first months’ bill.

It was crazy expensive!

It was over $14,000 dollars.

He immediately called the service provider and explained the situation and they basically told him “you signed a contract, sucks to suck. We want our money”.

He relented and set up a payment plan. He would also be required to keep the contract going until the bill was fully paid.

ISDN was eventually replaced by DSL.

Now, if you’ve never even heard of ISDN, even if you’re 30+ years old, I don’t blame you. This was a very short lived technology and was replaced by DSL just a couple years later but unlike ISDN, DSL required new infrastructure and for some reason I don’t fully understand but I have guessed is probably the way some important switch on the service provider’s network was set up, the two services could not coexist in the same small region.

Regions the size of like a neighborhood.

And G lived in a pretty nice neighborhood, not mansions but upper middle class. The best neighborhood our small town had to offer, in fact, and people just wanted DSL.

It was the first time the Internet was getting close to recognizable as it is today cause it was so, so much faster than what was previously available. The folks in this neighborhood wanted those speeds and did not like being told that they couldn’t have it.

G didn’t relent right away.

So, service provider, calls up G and explained the situation and offered to wave the remaining amount of the bill.

G told them the whole bill was nonsense and asked if they would refund what he had already paid.

But they just told him no.

Que malicious compliance.

He points out the contract.

G tells them he has a contract and points out that they are obligated to fulfill their end of the contract and he will be paying his bill in full and hung up.

He keeps paying.

Service provider keeps getting a calls from more customers wanting DSL and folks who had previously called, calling back more and more irate.

G gets another call, then another, until Service Provider decides to just tell people exactly who is responsible for their neighborhood’s lack of DSL service.

Here’s how it ended.

His neighbors let loose on him, but does G care? Not at all, just keeps paying his bill.

This went on for more than a year, eventually service provider just decided to get rid of ISDN completely as it was a legitimately outdated technology and did forgive the remainder of G’s bill since they weren’t fulfilling their end of their contract but the whole thing was just wonderful.

That’s anticlimactic. I was hoping the service provider would back down and reimburse G what he already paid. Instead, he paid an extra year towards the bill. Was the malicious compliance the service provider canceling the contract anyway?

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Someone who had an ISDN weighs in.

One person compares the internet bill to a water bill.

I’m not sure what the malicious compliance was either.

I wouldn’t keep paying the bill either.

Continuing to pay the bill didn’t benefit anyone.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.